Despite their countless spectacular and intensely emotional storylines, dramatic long-forms (screen, audio, prose, full-length stage) sometimes have to confront the issue of ‘treading water’. This applies equally to plot and to characters. It’s a kind of temporary flat-lining – the dynamism dips, the energy drains – and you find your mind wandering (and wondering, but not in a good way).
Haven’t we seen this story beat before? Rival siblings fight it out via ultra-slick dialogue and the chess game of inscrutable business decisions. Deal-making grand-masters they may be, but we’ve seen that moment already. More than once. The same happens character-wise: hang on, haven’t we felt this emotional beat before? The context might be different – new setting, unexpected backdrop – but it’s still a doomed-love situation and emotionally nothing’s changed, not even the power balance. Warning: repetition can seriously damage your drama’s health.
There are ways to fool an audience when you’re presenting same-again story beats and character emotions. Sometimes it’s deliberate, eg if you’re echoing a previous moment, but this time the result is different or there’s a new realisation or whatever. But you can’t keep doing it without intention. Writers need realistic motivations as much as their characters.
You can alter context, power balance, consequence; you can vary audience sympathy/understanding for each character and audience knowledge of, say, their struggles/backstory; you can raise the stakes for them. These are all devices to be tweaked as required. But you can’t keep doing it and expect today’s uber-literate audience to continue with ‘Next Episode’ and not even consider a quick cuppa or… gulp… an alternative viewing/listening/reading choice.
Treading water in drama incites a unified response from its audience which is basically ‘Get on with it!’ The problem is often at source – insufficient story or character emotional scope for the airspace provided. Sometimes it’s due to lazy/rushed/unimaginative storylining or structuring. But sometimes it’s because the characters aren’t given sufficient agency: they haven’t been allowed to grow. Inch by inch, millimetre by millimetre, the reality is that we are all constantly developing and changing our outlook, triggered by (even tiny) life events, or subtle shifts in our relationships. Writers and show-runners don’t always want popular characters to ‘grow’ because they may lose their shine, or perhaps the multitude of cleverly-conceived plot moments in the story bank will no longer apply. But I would suggest, as when our growing children grasp at their independence, you scupper it at your peril. Characters take on their own realities, their own truths, and sometimes as writers/creators/parents, all we can do is allow our protegees to evolve.
Sadly, treading water for too long will always have the same ending.
Liz John 